Western Digital External HFS+ Hard Drive Is in RAW Format

"My Western Digital external HFS+ hard drive is in RAW format when I connected it to Mac OS. I have saved some videos and images on this external hard drive, but I cannot read those files since Mac OS does not allow me to open a RAW drive. It frequently reports error message to ask me to format the WD external hard drive when I attempt to open the RAW drive. How to Recover Files from Western Digital external hard drive that has RAW format error?"

It is simple to repair RAW drive error on your Western Digital external hard drive, but the difficult thing is to convert an external hard drive from RAW to HFS+ without losing data. If you are making every effort to get a useful way to recover data when Western Digital external HFS+ hard drive is in RAW format, this page will share solution and tips to help fix the RAW error with all data back.

WD External HFS+ HDD RAW Format Recovery

You need to use data recovery software to recover data when a Western Digital external HFS+ hard drive turns to RAW format and becomes not accessible. iCare Data Recovery is a read-only data recovery which is able to restore files from RAW external hard drive. This software features in its deep scan recovery function, with which users can deep scan any RAW device to search inaccessible data. By using this software, you are able to recover data within a short time. iCare Data Recovery is a Windows-based data recovery program, so please plug the WD external hard drive to a Windows OS and then follow the steps below to perform data recovery:

Step1. Download and install iCare Data Recovery on a Windows PC. Launch the software and choose a proper scan mode.

Step2. Select the RAW WD external hard drive as target device and then wait the software to scan it for lost files.

Step3. You can preview the found files after scanning and then save the lost files to another drive.

Pay attention:

iCare Data Recovery is compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10, etc, so you can plug the WD external hard drive to any of Windows PC to recover all inaccessible files such as videos, music, documents, images, etc in batch..

Why Western Digital External Turns to RAW from HFS Plus?

Usually, Western Digital portable hard drive will not turn to RAW file system unless it suffers some unexpected disaster like virus attack, improper operation, etc. Generally speaking, a WD portable hard drive might become RAW file system from HFS+ due to following reasons:

1. Western Digital portable hard drive is corrupted due to virus infection
Is your Western Digital portable hard drive infected with virus? Virus infection is a terrible situation in which your WD portable HDD might turn to RAW file system and becomes inaccessible. You can do following things to avoid WD external HDD RAW error caused by virus infection:

Install antivirus software on your computer

Do not connect the WD portable hard drive to public computers

Do not visit unsafe website

2. WD portable hard drive contains bad sectors
Portable hard drive is not lifetime use. If you always use your WD portable hard drive properly, it can be used for about several years or much longer. However, if you often use it improperly, a portable hard drive is easy to be corrupted and contains bad sectors. You can pay attention to following points when using a portable hard drive:

Always remove WD external hard drive from computer safely

Do not unplug WD external HDD in data transferring or writing process

How to Fix WD External HDD RAW Format Error?

You need to format WD to convert RAW to NTFS on external hdd in order to repair RAW format error. Before formatting the external hard drive, you can do following things:
First of all, you had better check if all lost files have been restored. If some data has not been restored, you can re-use iCare Data Recovery to deep scan the RAW drive to search lost data.
Secondly, you can run antivirus software to check if the WD portable hard drive contains any virus. If the portable HDD is infected with virus, you had better use the antivirus software to delete all possible viruses.
Thirdly, you can check if the external HDD contains any bad sectors. You can check and repair bad sectors on the WD portable hard drive to stop the disk drive from being suffering data loss again in the future.
Finally, you can format the WD external hard drive. You had better connect the WD portable HDD to Mac OS if you want to format it to HFS plus file system.